This site is devoted to missionary memoirs--particularly those written by women. Their stories are less focused on position and status and statics and claims of success. Rather, they more often relate to sins and struggles and family issues and interpersonal problems of missionary work past and present.

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Thursday, January 18, 2018

Elizabeth Brewster

Here is a great story about a woman missionary to China during the first half of the 20th century. Anyone who is looking for a research topic related to China will find on this site a wealth of information.

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My Calvin Seminary Story

I began teaching at Calvin Theological Seminary in 2000--the first full-time woman professor in the school's 125-year history. In 2003, less than 3 months after Cornelius Plantinga, Jr. was installed as the new president, I was, without warning, removed from tenure track and given a terminal appointment. I have repeatedly asked that all the evidence be opened only to be blocked by a dishonest cover-up. When independent mediators were retained by the seminary board in 2005, they called for "retroactive pay to 2003" and my appointment as full professor. They also stated that the charges against me were inflammatory and should be removed from the record. That report was buried. I finished my second terminal appointment on August 31, 2006, and shortly thereafter published my story here.

Ruth Tucker, Ph.D.

Looking for a speaker? For academic and church conferences or for the Perspectives course, email me at tuckerworst@comcast [dot] net.

Women in the Bible

Dynamic Women of the Bible: What We Can Learn from their Surprising Storiesand my previous book andwebsite, The Biographical Bible, are filled with stories of fascinating Bible characters.

My Other Sites

About Me

I'm a teacher, writer, conference speaker, gardener, and blogger. Husband John Worst is Professor of Music emeritus at Calvin College. We love the outdoors and living on the Grand River, and we delight in our grandkids, Kayla, Mitchell, Ashley, and Zachary.

FROM JERUSALEM TO IRIAN JAYA: A Biographical History of Christian Missions

This book represents my first real breakthrough in writing, published first in 1983, with a major revision in 2004.

Pearl Buck

She grew up in China, a missionary kid who later wrote best-selling novels, including "The Good Earth."

Difficult Marriage: Buck's Parents

Here is an interesting TIME magazine review (Nov. 30, 1936)

Less than a year ago, Pearl Syden-stricker Buck published a sympathetic portrait of her mother called The Exile (TIME, Jan. 13). In that affectionate volume, Carrie Sydenstricker, sensible missionary and patient mother, far overshadowed her husband Andrew. He emerged as a zealous, absent-minded man who was constantly pushing deeper into China to gather converts of doubtful loyalty and understanding. Good, unquestioning, self-righteous, he caused Carrie more suffering than he knew. This week in another purely biographical volume that is the December choice of the Book-of-the-Month Club, Pearl Buck gets around to giving her father his innings. If The Exile is a labor of love, Fighting Angel is a labor of filial justice. It gives less evidence of Pearl Buck's understanding of her father than of her stubborn attempt to understand him.

Andrew was tall, bony, large-faced, the son of a hot-tempered West Virginia landowner, born into what the neighbors said was the "preachingest family in Greenbrier County, with dissenting blood as strong as lye." When he got the call to be a missionary nothing could stop him, neither the opposition of his father, his lack of resources nor the five years he had to spend on the farm before he could start college at the age of 21. Daughter Pearl Buck asked him how he had proposed to Carrie, when he was ready to take her along on his mission. "I wrote her a letter," he said. 'It seemed to me to be the only way of putting everything clearly before her for her mature reflection."

The Bucks started to China as soon as they were married. No romantic, Andrew thought Carrie's seasickness on the way over was all foolishness. He was sure she could feel better if she made an effort. As they started for the interior after Carrie had had four wisdom teeth pulled without anesthetics they returned because complications developed. "It was very inconvenient," Andrew later confessed to his daughter, "but we started again with a delay of a little under two hours. I was eager to get at my work."

The Chinese called Andrew "The Fool about Books." He preached, baptized, quarreled savagely with his brother missionaries, staked out for his domain a territory the size of Texas. In some villages dogs were set on him, in some he was beaten, in one he was captured by bandits. But in most the Chinese listened patiently and politely. They thought he was probably a good man, a little possessed, who was doing some religious penance. Carefully totting up each soul he had saved every year, Andrew was inclined to be doubtful about the women converts. "They haven't much real idea of what they are doing," he explained. "It's beyond them."

Paying her tribute to Andrew's disinterestedness, his courage, his picturesqueness and the devotion to his work that never flagged in all his 80 years, Pearl Buck nevertheless makes it clear that he was often a trial to his family, his fellow missionaries and sometimes to the Chinese. Shamelessly confessing that he wished he had sons instead of daughters, he never read any of Pearl Buck's writing. When he heard she was wasting God's time scribbling novels, he picked up one of her books, stared at it doubtfully, put it back. "I think I won't undertake that," he said. He died in 1931.

American Women in Mission

This is the best book on the topic and it's still in print. Dana Robert is an extraordinary writer and scholar.

Amy Carmichael

EXCERPT: pp.300-303, From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya

Carmichael insisted—at least outwardly—that reports of the work not be embellished.She was criticized for her book Things as They Are, because it gave a negative perspective of missions:“It is more important that you should know about the reverses than about the successes of the war.We shall have all eternity to celebrate the victories, but we have only the few hours before sunset in which to win them. . . . So we have tried to tell you the truth--the uninteresting, unromantic truth.”[Amy Carmichael, Things as They Are: Missionary Work in Southern India (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1903), 158.]

But as forthright as Carmichael was about the difficulties and downside of mission outreach, she was very careful to shield from public view any negative aspects of her private life or life inside Dohnavur Fellowship. She was also concerned that Dohnavur might become contaminated with the outside world.“O to be delivered from half-hearted missionaries!,” she wrote.“Don't come if you mean to turn aside for anything--for the ‘claims of society’. . . . Don't come if you haven't made up your mind to live for one thing--the winning of souls.”She insisted that those who worked with her were not to associate with other missionaries.Even when taking a rest at a retreat house in the hills, "you had to be insulated there from other missionary ideas and certainly from the rest of the European community.” [Elisabeth Elliot, A Chance to Die: The Life and Legacy of Amy Carmichael (Old Tappan, NJ:Fleming H. Revell, 1987), 142, 338.]

Her individualism and eccentricity is seen in her autobiographical writing.In one story, she tells about riding her horse wildly.“Oh, that you could see us as we tear along,” she wrote. “We are called the mad riders of Kotagiri.”While riding along a road, they came upon a group of people, including the retiring Anglican Bishop, the new bishop, his wife and “various old ladies.” The people “parted with alacrity as we shot through, and we caught a fleeting glance at the gaze of astonishment and horror.”There is a tone of contempt as she concludes her story: “Once I ran over a man.I did not mean to--he wouldn't get out of the way and one can't stop short in mid-gallop.” [Elliot, 119]

Another aspect of her separation from the world were her “Victorian sensitivities”—though the Victorian era was ending as she was beginning her mission work in India.Yet, the most extreme form of modesty reigned over Dohnavur.So offended by the English word leg was she, writes Elisabeth Elliot, that “even the doctors found themselves inserting [the Tamil word] kaal into an English sentence when it was necessary to refer to that unspeakable limb.”And, despite the medical work conducted at Dohnavur, “a missionary who worked with her many years later insisted that Amy not only did not then know the truth about sex, but never learned.” [Elliot, 297, 170.]

Carmichael was a hard task-master.When those who worked with her “raised the question of furlough or even just a weekend off,” they were denied the request.Even the nature of the ministry was rigidly guarded.When an elderly Indian co-worker, Saral, asked if she could teach Hindu women how to knit with some pink wool yarn she had been given, Carmichael “explained that the Gospel needed no such frills.”The woman “protested that there was nothing in the Bible which bore upon pink wool and knitting needles.”But Carmichael insisted there was.She quoted Zechariah 4:6, “Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the Lord of hosts.”[Elliot, 230, 126.]

She had utter contempt for non-Christian religious practices.Once while walking in the hills with Saral, they came upon three stones under a tree, which Seral identified as “heathen idols.” Carmichael was incensed: “To see those stupid stones standing there to the honor of the false gods, in the midst of the true God's beauty, was too much for us.We knocked them over and down they crashed. . . .”She also took a militant stance against Hinduism when it related to evangelism. Speaking of a high-caste woman who she hoped would openly express interest in the gospel, Carmichael responded:“If so, we shall be in the very thick of the fight again--Hallelujah!”Regarding another such woman, she wrote, “Will God move in [her] heart so that she will dare her husband's fury and the knife he flashed before her eyes?If so, our bungalow will be in the very teeth of the storm, angry men all around it, and we inside, kept by the power of God.” [Elliot, 121-22, 155-156.]

Not surprisingly other missionaries strongly disapproved of her approach.“There arose during the early years of the Dohnavur work,” writes Elliot, “a fairly strong ‘Get-Amy-Carmichael-out-of-India’ movement among missionaries and Indian Christians.”As the years passed, she was more often ignored than opposed by other missionaries.“But the criticism continued.Someone suggested that her efforts to save temple children were nothing more than a stunt, meant to draw attention to herself. . . . She was a dictator, she opposed marriage, her Indian girls worshipped her.”[Elliot 198, 201.]

Carmichael believed that she was divinely directed in her work and her decision-making. “Our Master . . . demands obedience,” she wrote, and it was her duty to obey the instructions.“Sometimes the Spirit of Jesus gave a direct command. . . . Sometimes and angel was sent, sometimes a vision. . . . In the end our God justifies His commands.” [Amy Carmichael, Gold Cord: The Story of a Fellowship (London:Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1932), 37, 179, 182.]

Carmichael was accused by some of being a dictator—particularly some of those who came to Dohnavur to work with her, including the Neill family who arrived in 1924—the parents, both physicians, and their daughter and son Stephen, a recent graduate of Cambridge. Within six months after their arrival the elder Neills had severed their ties with Dohnavur, but Stephen continued on for more than a year.Carmichael was impressed with his brilliance—particularly his quick grasp of the language, but she resented his efforts to change things God had already ordained.He introduced interscholastic athletics, bringing Dohnavur boys in contact with “the outside.”This, she viewed as perilous.In other ways he sought to bring Dohnavur closer to the missionary community, but she feared contamination. [Elliot, 268.]

The stormy relationship continued until November 28, 1925, when according to Elliot, Stephen Neill was dismissed from Dohnavur.For Carmichael, it was “one of the saddest nights of my life.”There had previously been an altercation which caused “a dreadful time of distress.”She wrote in her diary:“Never such known before.I am beginning to sink.Lord, save me.”A year after he left Dohnavur, she wrote to a friend:“I long over him still, miss him and want him and long to be one in affection.The stab is not even beginning to skin over.It's just red raw.” [Elliot, 268, 270.]

From Neill's perspective, this period of time was equally distressing, as he confessed in his autobiography:“During that first year, fellow Christians had brought into my life such darkness and suffering that it took me many years to recover from the injuries, and the scars are still there.[Stephen Neill, God's Apprentice:The Autobiography of Stephen Neill (London:Hodder & Stoughton.1991), 95.]Neill recalled his initial meeting with her as “an impression of power”—that not even the “smallest disagreement” was permitted. Those who came to Dohnavur found it to be a “myth.”It was a compound that was thoroughly separated from the surrounding area and “flooded with Europeans.”He later confessed, “I gave my whole soul to Dohnavur,” but his time spent there only brought him life-long wounds. [Elliot, 267-269.]“Some of the experiences of my first year in India,” he writes “were so excessively painful that by January 1926 the darkness was complete.A year in England helped, but this time of trouble did not really clear itself up until 1933.” [Neill, 45.]

Neill went on writte dozens of books, most notably A History of Christian Missions, and he served for many years as the Anglican Bishop of Tinnevelly—the district which included Dohnavur, though by that time, Carmichael had severed her ties with the Anglican church.

Though her final twenty years (following a serious fall) were spent as an invalid, Carmichael continued to write books and to plead for the cause of her “dear children.”She died at Dohnavur in 1951 at the age of eighty-three.

Adele Fielde

She is one of the most fascinating missionaries I've ever researched and written about.

Excerpt: pp. 290-294, From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya

Alele Marion Fielde

The life and public service of Alele Fielde (1839-1916) intersected with many facets of life besides that of overseas missions.Following her years of ministry in Thailand and China, she returned to the United States and became a strong voice in the women’s movement and became involved in scientific research.She was a confident and determined and resourceful woman whose missionary career powerfully illustrates the second-class status that confronted women who often sacrificed so much just to be permitted to give their lives in service to God.

Fielde grew up in East Rodman, New York, in a working class family who were Baptists, “of the tolerant New England kind.”But young Alele, “with her parent’s blessings, chose to be a Universalist, a more tolerant sect which believed in universal redemption, the salvation of all human beings .” She studied at the State Normal College in Albany and then became a school teacher, and was still single at age twenty-five, regarded by some as a “confirmed old maid.”Then in 1864, she was introduced to her best friend’s brother Cyrus Chilcott, a Baptist missionary candidate to Thailand.They courted and became engaged and she agreed to become a Baptist and to follow him to Thailand, once he was settled there.[Leonard Warren, Adele Marion Fielde: Feminist, Social Activist, Scientist (New York: Routledge, 2002), 9, 14.]

What was expected to be a hundred-day sea voyage for Fielde turned into a much longer perilous and harrowing journey that ended in heartbreak.Fielde was an excellent writer and lines from her journal tell the story best:

Great flakes of snow fell slowly on the deck as we stood watching the receding shore of native land. . . .During the ensuing night the waves rose high and for many consecutive days we were unable to leave our bunks. . . . In the Indian Ocean we encountered a typhoon that mauled and drove our ship for days. . . . As our ship passed slowly throught he straits between Java and Sumatra . . . jungle fever seized all on board save the captain. . . . A chill like that of ice in the veins was followed by scorching fever. . . . While in a state of coma, I was thought to have died. . . . On a clear morning in May we entered the harabor of Hongkong.Ten of the crew were carried ashore for burial. . . . I was barely able to stand, and Miss Sands, who had partially recovered arrayed me in white.[Ibid., 16-20.]

Dressed in white, Fielde was expecting the groom to appear, and there on the ship they were to be married by the Captain.But there was no groom.She soon learned that he had died of typhoid fever in Bangkok, ten days after she had sailed from New York.The captain tried to convince her to sail back to New York with him, but she insisted that she must go on to Thailand.If she did not, she would live with an emptiness and incompleteness for the rest of her life.She wrote a letter that was published in the Baptist Missionary Magazine, telling of that time of anguish:

I have journeyed seven weary months over tempestuous seas and in strange lands to meet my beloved and I found his grave with the grass upon it seven months old.I have come to my house; it is left unto me desolate.While I stood holding out my hand for a cup of happiness, one of fearful bitterness was pressed violently to my lips.I looked joyful to Providence and it turned upon me a face of inexpressible darkness.And because I believe in God I have been able to endure it.[Ibid., 23.]

The Baptist mission work in Bangkok had been opened by William Dean in the 1830s, and the ministry was primarily aimed at Chinese people living there.Bangkok was only one of many locations where “missions run by sixty Protestant missionaries had been established among Chinese immigrants”—due to prohibitions against mission work in China.Once China opened up after the Opium War, “the Bangkok mission was relegated to secondary importance.That is how Fielde found it when she arrived in 1865.She was determined to continue Chilcott’s ministry, but that is not what the mission director had in mind:“Though Dean was sympathetic to Adele’s plight, he did not consider her to be a suitable addition to the Bangkok mission.He treated her not treat as a single woman but as a widow, and he hoped that she might attract a young male missionary.” Yet, due to her special predicament, the American Baptist Missionary Union permitted her to remain, “though it was against policy.”The more proficient in the language she became, however, and the more effective her ministry was, “the more Dean tried to restrict her.”[Ibid., 24, 33.]

The Baptist mission work in Thailand could not be considered a success story.In 1868, Fielde reported that since Dean had begun the work more than thirty-five years earlier, the fifteen missionaries who had served in the mission, on an average, could account for the conversion of “fewer than three native Christians,” and even some of those conversions were considered dubious at best.But she was optimistic:“I don’t believe our Lord sends His servants on useless errands.”[Ibid., 33, 35.]

Fielde’s commitment to the ministry was often tested by what she viewed as unfair mission policies.As a teacher her salary had been three times what her mission salary was, and she soon discovered that a single male missionary received nearly double what her $400 annual allotment was.She was straightforward in her appeal to the mission board back home:“I cannot see why an unmarried woman giving all her time to missionary work, paying all her own expenses, having precisely the same or equal expenses—does not require and should not receive the same salary as an unmarried man.”[Ibid., 35.]After two years of debate over the matter, the mission increased her salary, with retroactive pay for one year.

Field’s relationship with William Dean continued to deteriorate, particularly after she began appealing for more single women to come to Thailand—single women, without family, who were more cost effective than married men with their families.Dean accused Fielde of being “dangerous to the interests of the cause.”She was also accused of not being “a true Baptist but a Universalist who chose to consort with the European community, bankers, diplomats, and other ‘unbelievers.’”Likewise, “she indulged in card-playing and attended dancing parties, forbidden by Baptists.”When she was called up short on her behavior, Dean was shocked when she responded:“I desire to be good. But I do not wish to be Pious.”When the mission board secretary wrote to her saying that the “incredible charges” that had been made against her put her ministry in “extreme peril,” she sought to defend herself, agreeing that card-playing was a mindless diversion but insisting that dancing was a wholesome exercise.[Ibid., 39.]

The controversy over Fielde raged for months, and in the end she was ordered to return home, after most of six years of ministry in Thailand.To calm her nerves during her final months, she had made herself a pipe and “smoked six thimblefuls of the kang cha” [hashish]—though she did not confess that indiscretion until years later.On her return trip to America, Fielde had a stop-over at the Chinese port of Swatow on the South China Sea.Here she was befriended by William and Eliza Ashmore, who invited her to return and work with them.They were impressed with her “high motives,” her good-natured personality, and her proficiency in the Chinese language.[Ibid., 41.]

When she returned home, she discovered that she had become somewhat of a celebrity—largely because of her writings.She took speaking engagements, and with the mission board’s approval returned to work in China. With the Ashmores, Fielde reveled in the late nineteenth-century triumphalism that characterized evangelical missions.Missionaries were “winning splendid victories,” Ashmore had written.They were “entering no battle but to conquer. . . . Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, are but the shadows of their former strength, and seem on the point of extinction.”[Ibid., 54.]

Soon after she returned to China, Fielde became involved in the training of Bible women.“It was said that the conversion of one woman was worth the conversion of twenty men, and if the women could not be reached, there was no hope for the evangelical movement in China.”Training Bible women was not an idea introduced by Fielde; others had effectively conducted such work.“But Fielde institutionalized the program, explicitly defining its structure, mode of operation, and aims, and she implemented the plan with vigor, fully employing her organizational skills, and her capacity for hard work.”She had students ranging from their early twenties to their mid seventies.“Overall, about five hundred passed through he school in a twenty-year period.”[Ibid., 61-62, 65, 67.]

Her mission strategy was simple and served as a model for training Bible women throughout China:

It was Miss Fielde’s practice to gather Christian women for instruction and to teach them thoroughly one lesson from the Gospel.When they had learned it, she sent them out, two by two, into the country about to tell the lesson to villagers.After a time they were gathered at Swatow and received another portion of the truth and having obtained a thorough grasp of it, went forth to carry the good news of salvation.[Helen N. Stevens, Memorial Biography of Adele M. Fielde: Humanitarian (NY: The Fielde Memorial Committee, 1918), 115.]

Fielde’s writing skills made her a priceless asset to the mission, as she wrote stories to be published and consumed by mission supporters.She “had each Bible-woman tell her story, which she translated and published in magazines,” writes Leonard Warren.“Their heart-rending sagas proved enormously appealing to American women, who could sympathize with their suffering Chinese sisters.”[Warren, 70.]She later compiled the stories into a book, Pagoda Shadows.In addition to her teaching and writing, she compiled a Dictionary of the Swatow Dialect, which went through many publications.

In 1883, she returned to American for home leave, spending part of her time on a speaking tour and nearly two years studying at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia—the “happiest” years of her life.At the end of her furlough, she was asked to serve as president of Vasser College, but she turned down the offer, determined instead to return to her ministry in China with her faithful Bible women.

Fielde had trained her best students to train others, so when health problems developed she was relieved that she could return home with good conscience.In 1889, she resigned the mission and spent the next two years traveling home through India, the Middle East, and Europe.Her last years were devoted to the suffragist movement, public lecturing, organizational work, and humanitarian endeavors—and most notably science.She conducted biological research on ants and published her findings in scholarly scientific journals.The was fascinated by the theories of the century’s most noted scientist, Charles Darwin, and found no discrepancy between science and religion.

In many respects, Fielde was an enigma regarding religious matters.A free-thinker from childhood, she broke from her family’s Baptist roots to become a Universalist, only to be baptized a Baptist prior to her anticipated marriage.She faithfully served as a Baptist missionary for two decades and then turned to science.“After breaking with the Baptist Missionary Union, and shedding the certainties of sectarian Christianity,” writes Warren, “she never again joined any religious organizations. . . . Yet Fielde had not the slightest hesitation in proclaiming that Christianity was the best of all possible religions.” [Ibid., 139, 143.]When she died in 1916, she left behind not only scientific research and writings on racial reconciliation, but also Bible women who were training other Bible women and literature in Chinese that would be used for decades to follow.

At the time of her death, her Baptist mission society did not even publish her obituary in its official magazine.Ten years later, however, she was eulogized as the “mother of our Bible women and also the mother of our Bible schools.”[Frederick B. Hoyt, “’When a Field was Found too Difficult for a Man, a Woman should be Sent’” Adele M. Fielde in Asia, 1865-1890,” The Historian, 44 (May 1982), 334.]

On the surface, Alele Fielde had much in common with another unmarried Baptist woman [Lottie Moon] from America who arrived in China in 1873, the very same year that she did (though she had been serving in Thailand previously).In a letter to this other woman, H. A. Tupper, secretary for the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board, had written: “I estimate a single woman in China is worth two married men.” On the average that may have been true, but few could have argued—then or now—thatAdele Fielde and Lottie Moon combined were “worth” more than four married men.

Johanna Veenstra

Missionary Heroine of the Christian Reformed Church

Excerpt: pp. 303-306, From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya

Johanna Veenstra

Perhaps the most striking aspect of single women in missions was the status the profession conferred to otherwise very ordinary individuals. This was also true in certain cases with men, but not to such a great extent. A man had to excel. He had to attain some kind of distinction in his missionary service to be rated a “missionary hero,” but a woman could became a “heroine” just by having the courage to strike out on her own and go to a distant land.This was true of Johanna Veenstra, who in many ways is representative of the vast army of single women who went abroad after the turn of the century. She was repeatedly referred to as a “heroine” by her admiring biographer (Henry Beets, Director of Missions of the Christian Reformed Church).An obscure stenographer turned celebrity in Christian Reformed circles, she was in many ways very ordinary. Her life, however, sheds light on the sacrifice as well as the expectations placed on her and her fellow “heroines” of the faith.

Veenstra was born in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1894, two years before her father left his carpentry trade to train for ministry.But only months after completing his ministerial training and beginning his pastoral ministry he contracted typhoid fever and died. His death brought hardship and poverty to the widow and her six small children. She returned to Paterson where she opened a general store. Johanna attended Christian schools until she was twelve and then trained to become a secretary. At the age of fourteen, she became a stenographer in New York City, commuting every day from Paterson.

She was active in her Christian Reformed Church, but it was while attending a Baptist church that she underwent a religious experience that sparked her interest in missions. At the age of nineteen she enrolled at the Union Missionary Training Institute in New York City and then applied to the Sudan United Mission for missionary service in Africa. Mission policy, however, required candidates to be twenty-five, so in the interim she took further schooling at Calvin College, where she became the first woman member of the Student Volunteer Board. Before sailing to Africa she returned to New York for medical training and graduated from the midwifery course.

Veenstra’s assignment under the SUM involved pioneer work at Lupwe, not far from Calabar (where Mary Slessor had served some years earlier). The station at Lupwe was new and consisted only of a few unfinished and unfurnished huts with dirt floors, but she adjusted to the very primitive conditions quickly—or at least gave that impression when writing home: “When having my evening meal, here were those creatures, in swarms, sticking fast in hand, dropping in the food—and I concluded a plague was upon us. There was no ‘shutting’ them out because in these native huts we have no ceiling.” The rats, too, were bothersome, but she did not complain. God had called her. “There has never been a single regret that I left the ‘bright lights and gay life’ of New York City, and came to this dark corner of his vineyard. There has been no sacrifice, because the Lord Jesus Himself is my constant companion.”[1]

One of her first projects was to set up a boarding school to train young men as evangelists.It was an all-consuming project, but she found time for medical and evangelistic work. Sometimes her treks into neighboring villages lasted for several weeks at a time. There were rarely outward professions of faith. Just obtaining an attentive audience was a major sign of success.But if on “rare occasions” she witnessed “people weep as they were hearing the story of the death of our Lord” and “gasp with wonder and clap their hands in gratitude to God for His gifts,” there were “very discouraging” times too:

I took one trek through the hills, walking from place to place for nine days.… We planned to stay over Sunday at a certain village but it proved that we were not welcome. They did not want to provide food for the carriers and the others who were with me. So they suffered a good deal of hunger. Rain hindered the people coming to meetings. I sat at a hut door, with an umbrella to keep me dry, while the people were huddled together inside the hut about a fire. On Sunday afternoon a heavy thunderstorm arose. The rain came down in torrents. The hut where I camped was a grass-walled one, and the rain cam rushing in until the whole place was flooded.… Early the next morning we started off for a long walk to another hill.… The chief was at home, but he was sick. We stopped here one night, and decided to go home. How glad we were to see our Lupwe compound.[2]

Veenstra’s usual means of transportation from village to village was a bicycle, but it was slow and very tiring peddling uphill in rough terrain, especially considering her tendency to be overweight. She secretly envied some of the male missionaries who were moving about in relative ease on their motorcycles, and so after he second furlough in 1927 she returned to Africa with a new motorcycle, Her matronly appearance no doubt made for a curious sight as she began her motorized journey inland over the bumpy trails, but no one could question her pluck. Despite her initial enthusiasm and determination, she soon discovered that “dirt-biking” was not her niche. Less than forty miles out, she unexpectedly hit sand and was thrown from the bike. Badly bruised in body and spirit, she sent for help and resigned herself to go back to peddling.

Although she willingly lived in a native hut and accepted the Africans for who they were, she entered their world with a spirit of domination. “It is necessary,” she wrote, “that the missionary continually hold an attitude of superiority. Not in the sense of ‘we are better than you.’ God forbid! But rather in the sense of claiming and using authority. The missionary must prove himself or herself to be ‘boss’ (not bossy), commanding and demanding obedience.”[3] This kind of paternalism (or maternalism in this case) was the norm, and she as much as any missionary, was a product of her generation. But such attitudes, nevertheless, contributed to the bitter animosities that led to violent revolution in that part of the world only a few decades later.

But during the 1920s and ’30s, while she was pouring her life into Africa, there seemed to be little evidence of resentment. Her medical work was particularly appreciated, and it as considered a privilege to attend her boarding school. It was thus a great sorrow to the people of Lupwe and neighboring villages when they received word of their missionary’s untimely death in 1933. She had entered a mission hospital for what was thought to be routine surgery, but she never recovered.

Back home in the news was received by her family and friends with disbelief and sorrow. But they were God-fearing Christian Reformed people who never questioned God’s sovereignty in such matters. Their “heroine” had merely been promoted to a higher position and was now enjoying far greater riches than she so willingly relinquished on earth. Ironically, a letter that arrived from her after her death, though written about an African Christian who had died, was titled appropriately for Veensta herself, “From a Mudhut to a Mansion on High.”[4]

Daughters of the Church: Women in Ministry from New Testament Times to the Present

I co-authored this book with Walter Liefeld. It's a book on missions---if we're using the term broadly.

Charlotte Diggs "Lottie" Moon

Patron Saint of Southern Baptist Missions who served in China until her death.

Lottie Moon's Early Life

By John Allen Moore

You know about Lottie Moon. She rendered sacrificial missionary service in China long ago.

You know she aroused Southern Baptists to begin a Christmas offering for foreign missions and that the offering bears her name.

But did you know that a leading Southern Baptist educator called her “the most cultivated woman” he had ever known? She belonged to the first small class of Southern women to receive a university-level master of arts degree.

Did you know that, even in the days when male predominance was unchallenged, the corresponding secretary of the Foreign Mission Board consulted her repeatedly for her wise counsel with mission administration?

Did you know that although she fully accepted the idea that men should do the preaching and the leading for mixed groups, she once offered her resignation when the board seemed to be preparing to deny the vote to women in its missions? Her own mission in North China gave women full voice and influence, but Miss Moon refused to serve under an agency that denied this on other fields.

Did you know she was quoted by one who knew her as having said she was only 4 feet, 3 inches tall? This was a recollection after many years and not quite accurate; though not a dwarf, she was petite.

Charlotte Digges Moon, born Dec. 12, 1840, grew up in an eight-room plantation house—Viewmont—on extensive Harris-Moon land holdings just south of Charlottesville, Va. Viewmont had 50 or more slaves to attend to every manual task. Lottie, as she came to be known, was the third of seven children. Private tutors came and went teaching the youngsters in the classics, French and music.

When Lottie was 12, her wealthy father died of a heart attack or stroke while on a business trip traveling by boat from New Orleans to Memphis. His widow, Anna-Maria Moon, then 44, assumed family leadership. A cultured, rather well-educated Southern lady, she held staunchly to her Baptist faith, though some other members of the family became Catholics or members of the Christian Church. She conducted Sunday worship in her home, unless some itinerant Baptist preacher came by.

The Moon children—even the girls, although contrary to Southern custom—received the best possible education. Each was left free to choose his or her own course. The eldest, Thomas, became a doctor but died early in his career while tending patients in a cholera epidemic.

Orianna, Lottie’s older sister, flying in the face of tradition, received her M.D. degree from a Pennsylvania medical college in 1857. She and a North Carolinian were the first women of the South to earn degrees in medicine.

Lottie was sent in 1854 to a girls’ school run by leading Virginia Baptists and boasting a hundred boarding students. Most of each day was rigorously scheduled. Lottie distinguished herself in studies, especially Latin and French. She belonged to a literary society and helped edit its paper. Her worst grades were in math, science—and “deportment.” Early on April Fools’ Day her second year she climbed the school’s bell tower and muffled the bell with towels and sheets. Classes started late that day.

John A. Broadus, Baptist pastor in Charlottesville, along with Crawford H. Toy and other Baptist scholars, began Albemarle Female Institute in the city; all teachers held master’s degrees, unique for women’s schools. Its basic premise was that women should have educational opportunities equal in excellence to those offered men. Lottie enrolled at the institute.

Never a beauty, but vivacious and fun-loving, she became one of the most popular students. She soon gained the reputation of being a “brain.” She did well in everything she tried. She excelled in language, becoming proficient in Latin, Greek, French, Italian and Spanish.

One professor—Crawford Toy, probably the one who later courted her—said, “She writes the best English I have ever been privileged to read.” Toy also suggested she take up Hebrew, and gave her a Hebrew Bible, inscribed to her. She followed his suggestion.

Lottie was also the institute prankster. She called new non-Baptist students aside and told them they would have to join the local Baptist church. To their tearful protests that they did not wish to become Baptists, Lottie replied that since the principal was Baptist, he expected all students to join. The poor girls would flee in distress to a professor, only to be informed with a patient sigh that this was just another of Lottie Moon’s practical jokes.

One student asked what “D” stood for in the middle of her name. Lottie shot back, “It stands for ‘Devil’—don't you think it suits me excellently?” The nickname stuck. She signed a poem for student publication, “Deville.”

Students, including her closest friend, thought her a skeptic. A student once noted she hadn't seen Lottie at church on Sunday. The reason, Lottie retorted, was that she hadn’t been there; she’d been lying on a haystack reading Shakespeare—much better than a dry sermon.

Pastor Broadus, already invited to help open Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Greenville, S.C., conducted a series of evangelistic meetings in his church in December 1858. He directed appeals for life dedication and Christian service mainly to students.

Concerned students at the institute held sunrise devotional and inquiry services. Lottie's name was prominent on their prayer list. In the midst of one gathering Lottie surprised everyone by appearing. She told how she had attended the service the evening before, then left it “to scoff.” But in her room she couldn’t sleep because of a barking dog. Her rambling thoughts finally turned to her spiritual condition. She decided to give Christianity an honest, intellectual investigation. This lasted with soul-searching prayer, all night.

Now she had made her choice—for Christ—and would join the church. There was rejoicing at that meeting and later in the church service. She gave her testimony at church, the only kind of occasion on which a woman was allowed to speak to a mixed gathering.

Fellow student Julia Toy, sister of her English and Greek professor and a lifelong friend, said of her: “She had always wielded an influence because of her intellectual power. Now her great talent was directed into another channel. She immediately took a stand as a Christian.”

The pastor kept before students and others the challenge to ministry and mission. Among the many to respond were Crawford Toy and John L. Johnson, who later would marry Julia Toy. Both men surrendered for mission service. The Foreign Mission Board appointed them to open work in Japan, but health and other reasons prevented them from going. Lottie also evidently felt the beginnings of a call to foreign missions. She remained at Albemarle Female Institute four years and received both the full-course degree and the master of arts degree.

By this time the Civil War was on. Many suppose that Toy, who served in the Confederate chaplaincy, proposed marriage to Lottie at this time. If so, she did not accept.

Lottie seems to have spent most of the war years at Viewmont, helping on the plantation and tutoring younger sister Edmonia—“Eddie.” Lottie was at Viewmont when General Robert E. Lee surrendered at nearby Appomattox and the Confederacy crumbled.

Lottie’s mother at the start of the war loyally converted all cash assets into Confederate money and bonds—now a total loss. She let son Isaac sell most of her land for a pittance to secure enough to live on. She leased remaining land, except the house and immediate surroundings. But debts could not be collected; cash was very short.

Conditions were not as bad in border states, and Lottie applied to teach in the Danville (Ky.) Female Academy, operated by the local First Baptist Church. She taught there five years—history, English grammar, rhetoric, literature—even after the school merged with another run by the Presbyterians. Active in the church and as popular there as in the school, she assisted the pastor in various ministries and taught teenage girls in Sunday School. In Danville she met returned Southern Baptist missionaries who had served in China. Lottie's mission interest deepened.

The situation at Viewmont steadily grew worse. Lottie divided her wages with her mother to pay interest on debts and avoid foreclosure on remaining property. Mrs. Moon died, in peace and faith, in June 1870. Viewmont was divided among the children, but legal battles dragged on until 1884, when Lottie got a very small settlement and Eddie a bit more (originally meant for her education).

As Lottie and Eddie rode horseback over the estate after their mother’s burial, Eddie revealed her dreams of being a missionary to China. Converted at age 16, she had received strong impressions while at college from reports of foreign work, especially those of Martha (Mrs. T.P.) Crawford in north China. Lottie confessed she had felt similar impressions, but squelched them due to family duties.

In her last year in Danville, Lottie developed an ardent friendship with another young woman teacher, “A.C.” Stafford, who taught the subjects most troublesome to Lottie: math, natural philosophy, astronomy. A.C., a Presbyterian, like Lottie was interested in foreign missions.

Pleasant Moon, Lottie’s distant cousin and a merchant in Cartersville, Ga., with other men of the town opened a school for girls. Lottie and A.C. became teachers and co-principals, starting the summer of 1871. The school’s advanced section was equal academically to the best female colleges. Opening with seven students, the school soon enrolled a hundred.

Lottie and Eddie gave through the Foreign Mission Board to aid Martha Crawford’s school for girls in China. Lottie also gave—always anonymously—to other projects, including a Baptist church building in Rome, Italy.

The board at the time was not appointing single women missionaries. Martha Crawford wrote pleas for such appointments, explaining that men could not render the needed service among women in the homes of China. H.A. Tupper, the board’s new corresponding secretary, proved an advocate of women’s work in and for missions.

Eddie—at 21, more than 10 years younger than Lottie—on impulse wrote Tupper asking to be permitted to go to China with a missionary couple who were to be accompanied by the wife’s unmarried sister. Eddie offered to pay her own expenses until support could be arranged. However, women of five Richmond churches organized to support her. Salary: $400 a year. She sailed with the group and by June was in China. Her letters beckoned Lottie.

Still interested, Lottie wondered whether a single woman could find fulfillment in light of restraints placed on women in any kind of public ministry. She had taken part in a continuing controversy in Baptist papers of Virginia and other states about women’s role. She researched work of deaconesses in European churches and recommended that Southern Baptist churches, especially larger ones, employ deaconesses “to minister to the poor and suffering, establish Sunday Schools, sewing schools, night schools, mother's meetings.”

She added, “Our Lord does not call on women to preach, or to pray in public, but no less does He say to them than to men, ‘Go, work in my vineyard.’”

Lottie felt her call to China “as clear as a bell” in February 1873 after the Cartersville Baptist pastor preached about missions. Lottie left the service to go to her room, where she prayed all afternoon. A.C. also felt led to join a Presbyterian mission in China. Students wept when the teachers said they were leaving.

On July 7, 1873, the Foreign Mission Board appointed Charlotte Digges Moon. She was asked to join her sister in Tengchow. About to sail from San Francisco, Lottie got word Baptist women in Cartersville would support her.

The steamship Costa Rica carried a large number of missionaries of several denominations bound for the Far East. Lottie wrote that they never expected to see home again. Missionary appointment generally was “for life.” There were no regular furloughs or retirement.

After 25 seasick days for Lottie, the ship docked at Yokohama. She went ashore—also later at Kobe and Nagasaki—and fell in love with Japan and its people. En route to Shanghai, the ship was caught in a hurricane, and the crippled vessel limped back to Nagasaki.

With Martha Crawford, Lottie traveled by boat northward along the coast to Chefoo in Shantung, the province then considered the most densely populated on earth. Tengchow and Chefoo were among port cities forced open by foreign powers for trade and mission work in 1858. Foreigners were subject not to Chinese authorities but to their own. The imposed treaties guaranteed toleration for foreign and even Chinese Christians.

From Chefoo, Lottie traveled the 55 miles to Tengchow in a shentze. Shaped like a huge barrel on its side, open at the front and heavily padded inside, a shentze had a long, supporting pole on either side attached to mules in front and behind. This afforded Lottie a skickening two-day ride. Exhausted, she arrived Oct. 25 in Tengchow, to be her home for 39 years.

Shantung province was home of the honored teacher of ancient times, Confucius. Tengchow, the chief city, had a static population of 80,000. Massive walls of gray stone, dating from before the time of Christ, surrounded the city. The narrow streets were paved with worn millstones.

Lottie and Eddie, delighted to be reunited, moved into quarters in T.P. Crawford’s compound. J.B. Hartwell, the real pioneer in Tengchow, had begun a church years before in the northern part of the city, but the two men could not get along, disagreeing on almost everything. Crawford started his own congregation, Monument Street Baptist Church, and completed its Western-style building with tower—highly offensive to Chinese—the year before Lottie arrived.

Lottie saw at once that it was not wise for her and Eddie to live with the Crawfords, though she would continue through the years to attend Monument Street church. She and Eddie moved to the mission compound of the other church. In her first week at Tengchow, Lottie wrote Baptist women of Richmond and other points suggesting funds be raised to build a house for the Moon sisters. On the property to be purchased, Eddie and Lottie also wanted to open a girls’ boarding school.

Sallie J. Holmes, slightly older than Lottie and a pioneer in north China, lived with her young son in a Chinese house near the Crawford compound. She and her husband had worked in the area before treaties opened it to foreigners; brigands had murdered Holmes. Now Mrs. Holmes conducted a girls’ boarding school. She turned over to Eddie a small day school for boys and traveled to villages, evangelizing among women house to house.

As was the custom for new missionaries, an educated Chinese man was engaged as Lottie’s language teacher. He visited her home daily, pointing out Chinese characters with his scholar’s inches-long fingernails and hearing her pronounce words after him until her intonation satisfied him. It usually took about two years for a foreigner to get a good working knowledge of the spoken language; there were many local dialects. Lottie progressed rapidly and became interested in Chinese history and culture.

Within weeks she was visiting with Sallie Holmes or Martha Crawford in Tengchow homes. Then she began country work. Sallie took the lead, riding her braying donkey; the other women, sometimes including Eddie, rode in sedan chairs borne by coolies. If a tour was to last several days, another donkey would be laden with bedrolls and provisions. The experienced missionaries would tell the gospel story to crowds of women and children in each village and teach hymns and a catechism Martha had prepared. Sometimes a Chinese deacon would go along and, if village men gathered also, he would preach.

For recreation, Lottie enjoyed occasional social gatherings of Baptist and Presbyterian missionaries in Tengchow. She swam in the sea, rode donkeys sidesaddle, collected seashells, took walks on the city wall and embroidered. A.C. Stafford, stationed in a Presbyterian mission near Shanghai, remained a good friend. She and the Moon sisters exchanged visits, and she made suggestions that Lottie followed, such as securing Bible picture cards from the United States to give to Chinese children.

Lottie kept up extensive correspondence with Tupper at the Foreign Mission Board and with women across the South, especially in Virginia and Georgia. She begged for missionary recruits, including single women. She wrote articles for the Virginia Religious Herald and other Baptist papers, urging women to organize more mission societies, pray for worldwide work and give generously for it. At board headquarters and elsewhere her letters in faultless prose were copied and recopied and sent to women’s groups throughout the convention.

The Hartwell-Crawford controversy made mission work difficult in Tengchow. Lottie tried to mediate. She wrote Tupper and the board in 1876, outlining the situation impartially about differences in mission theory and personality and the mission properties on both sides. Board members marveled at her ability to lay out the complicated case succinctly and convincingly like a lawyer before a high court. She warned the board not to view the situation as hopeless or even unique—other mission agencies also had disputes. The problem was not finally solved, however, until Hartwell resigned three years later.

Eddie Moon, obviously immature and emotionally unstable, faced one health problem after another. She often was irascible and contentious. When she first set foot on Chinese soil in 1872, culture shock had been so great she wanted to return home at once. A Shanghai doctor pronounced her “hysterical.” She settled down a bit, did well with the language, taught in Sunday School and led the boys’ school.

On a wintry day early in 1874 Edddie, Lottie, a deacon and other Chinese Christians went to a village to hold services. Upon return, Eddie was weak and ill. Pneumonia developed, then typhoid. Late that year she suffered respiratory problems. She sought help in Shanghai.

Mrs. Yates saw that Eddie’s condition was more than China missionaries could deal with; she took her to Japan and sent word to Lottie to meet them in Nagasaki. Both older women saw that Eddie must return home permanently, and Lottie would have to go along. Three days before Christmas 1875 the Moon sisters reached Viewmont. Eddie was put to bed at once; three doctor relatives treated her. Prescription: cod liver and whiskey.

Lottie was eager to return to China, but not until Baptist women in Richmond raised needed funds would she be able to reach the field once again—in December 1877.

"How many there are ... who imagine that because Jesus paid it all, they need pay nothing, forgetting that the prime object of their salvation was that they should follow in the footsteps of Jesus Christ in bringing back a lost world to God."

- Lottie MoonTungchow, ChinaSept. 15, 1887

"I wasn't God's first choice for what I've done for China…I don't know who it was…It must have been a man…a well-educated man. I don't know what happened. Perhaps he died. Perhaps he wasn't willing…and God looked down…and saw Gladys Aylward…And God said - "Well, she's willing." - Gladys Aylward

"The saddest thing one meets is a nominal Christian. I had not seen it in Japan where missions is younger. The church here is a "field full of wheat and tares." - Amy Carmichael

"What are we here for, to have a good time with Christians or to save sinners?" - Malla Moe

Helen Barrett Montgomery

The premier leader of the early 20th century Women's Missionary Movement, also a prolific writer